October 1 in business history: a scanner EMI could not sell, a network with two phones, and a website that took one application in a hundred
Three October 1s — the first clinical CT scan in 1971, Japan's first 3G network in 2001, and the HealthCare.gov launch in 2013 — show how a launch is decided by the parts that are not the product.
Three October 1s, and on each one the centrepiece worked: a machine that photographed the inside of a living brain in 1971, the world's first third-generation mobile network in 2001, and an online insurance marketplace opened in 2013 on the day the law said it must.
Each of the three worked. Each was settled by something that was not the machine.
The scan that worked, and the company that could not sell it
On 1 October 1971 a team led by the engineer Godfrey Hounsfield scanned a woman with a suspected brain tumour at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London 1. The image showed a cystic mass the size of a plum in her left frontal lobe, and it made every earlier way of seeing inside a skull obsolete 1.
EMI was a record company — Electric and Musical Industries, the Beatles' label — with no X-ray business at all 1. By the end of 1977 it had sold more than 300 scanners at $300,000 to $600,000 each, and medical electronics was delivering almost 20 per cent of its pre-tax profit 2.
The market left anyway. In the United States, where scanner sales grew from $7 million in 1973 to $360 million in 1977, EMI's share fell from 100 per cent in 1973 to 71 per cent in 1975 and 37 per cent in 1976 as Technicare and then General Electric took it 2. EMI never built its own distribution in continental Europe or Japan, and licensed Japanese manufacturing to Toshiba, which then built its own machine from the design 2. Thorn bought EMI for £165 million at the end of 1979, and the medical business was sold off in 1980 and 1981 3. Hounsfield collected the Nobel Prize in 1979.
Decision mirror: The market EMI invented is now worth about $7.8 billion a year 4. It belongs to GE HealthCare, Siemens Healthineers, Philips and Canon — the companies already selling X-ray equipment into hospitals in 1971 — while EMI's scanner business is gone.
The network that was ready before the phones were
NTT DoCoMo opened FOMA, the world's first commercial 3G service, in Tokyo and Yokohama on 1 October 2001 5. It ran at 384 kilobits a second, twenty-six times the fastest service DoCoMo sold, and reached only thirty kilometres from the centre of Tokyo 56.
Almost nothing else was ready. Of the ten handset makers DoCoMo had signed, two had phones for the first day; the cheapest cost $358, against $167 to $250 for the 2G handsets it replaced 6. DoCoMo's president promised 150,000 3G subscribers by March 2002; the plan shown to investors was six million by March 2004 56.
The phones did arrive — five million FOMA subscribers by July 2004 7. The value did not stay. DoCoMo sold Apple's iPhone only from September 2013, after its two main rivals, and still lost about 93,000 subscribers net that October 8. NTT bought the rest of DoCoMo for ¥4.25 trillion in 2020 9, and on 31 March 2026 it switched FOMA and i-mode off 10.
Decision mirror: T-Mobile and SpaceX opened the data tier of their direct-to-cell satellite service on 1 October 2025, covering the 500,000 square miles of the United States that no cell tower reaches 1112. It runs on "the majority of phones from the last four years" — the same dependency DoCoMo met in 2001, when the network was only as useful as the handset in the customer's pocket 11.
The website that shipped before it was connected
HealthCare.gov opened on 1 October 2013, the date the Affordable Care Act set for enrolment, on the same day a federal government shutdown began 13. Its lead contractor, CGI Federal, grew from a $93.7 million budget to $292 million by launch, and the inspector general later put the website's cost at $1.7 billion 13.
The site was live and unusable. Contractors ran a stress test one day before launch and found it too slow at 1,100 simultaneous users; the first day drew 250,000, against a design for 50,000 to 60,000 13. By one estimate, about one person in a hundred who tried to enrol in the first week could finish 13.
The Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general found that Medicare and Medicaid officials had "retained a fixed deadline for launch, despite poor progress" and never seriously considered a delay 14. Reorganising the team and cutting scope recovered the site within two months 14; 5.4 million people selected a plan through the federal marketplace that first season 14, and the same system booked 23.1 million plan selections for 2026 15.
Decision mirror: A single unverified configuration update on 19 July 2024 reached more than 8.5 million Windows computers at once and stopped airlines, hospitals and banks; Parametrix put the direct cost to the Fortune 500 at more than $5.4 billion 16. The test that would have caught either failure is the same one: the whole system, together, before the date.
Three questions for the week
- What does your launch depend on that you do not own? EMI had the best scanner in the world and no way to reach half its buyers with it 2.
- Who supplies the parts you do not make? DoCoMo had a network; two of ten handset partners had a phone, and the cheapest was $358 6.
- What does a fixed date cost that a staged one would not? HealthCare.gov's last test before launch broke at 1,100 users, and it opened to a quarter of a million 13.
References
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- 3Company Histories, "EMI Group plc"
company-histories.com
- 4Fortune Business Insights, "Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis"
fortunebusinessinsights.com
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- 13Wikipedia, "HealthCare.gov"
en.wikipedia.org
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